Thursday, 18 October 2012

The Black Museum: An interview with Paul Corupe

New on the Toronto horror scene this fall is The Black Museum, a lecture series devoted to genre appreciation. The series is five lectures spread out over two months, and each talk is hosted by someone different--directors, critics, and academics all lend their expertise. The brainchild of Paul Corupe, Andrea Subisatti, and Stuart Feedback Andrews, the lecture series takes its name from the legendary Black Museum in Scotland Yard, a room which once housed evidence and artifacts from Britain's most infamous crimes. Informal, and with an emphasis on engaging the audience in substantive discussion about genre cinema, The Black Museum is a great opportunity for horror fans to connect with different people from, and aspects of, the industry.

I had an opportunity to ask Paul Corupe a few choice questions about The Black Museum as well as his own views and opinions about horror scholarship.

You've said elsewhere The Black
Museum was inspired by The Miskatonic Institute of Horror in
Montreal. Can you explain how your lecture series differs from
theirs?

In spirit and basic goals we are the
same, but the Miskatonic Institute is probably more classroom-based
than The Black Museum, and that’s kind of reflected in our
names—our attitude is more that we want people to stop by, have fun
checking out our latest “exhibit” and then have an informal
discussion about it with their peers. Miskatonic follows more of an
actual “school” model than we do, often having longer classes
that run multiple days/evenings and looking at very specific academic
topics like critical approaches to horror theory. In addition to
having different lecturers with different personal interests here in
Toronto, part of the reason we approach this a bit differently is
because Miskatonic was done out of a micro-cinema run by one of the
founders, Kier-La Janisse, and we have to share space and time with a
fully functioning theatre, so we can’t do it as often or for quite
as long. But also, we were also inspired by local events like TIFF’s
Director Master Classes and Trampoline Hall that we felt had a format
that Torontonians would be already familiar with.

Film in general is certainly a
popular topic of study but to my knowledge no other film genre has
the same kind of community following as horror. What is it about
horror that lends itself so well to sociocultural analysis and
scholarship?

Well, generally horror films share a
more specific and limited pool of archetypes and iconography than
other genres, and I’d even go so far as to say many horror films
are variations on just a handful of themes. Possession, boogey men,
old dark houses, life beyond death, religious symbols, butcher
knives, masks—these are just some of the familiar things that are
used, re-used and given new meanings over the years, making them ripe
for analysis and over-analysis. And horror films, while enjoyable on
the surface, usually have much more going on than just gore and
stalking. And more than other genres, horror tropes are used to
disguise social critiques—Rod Serling famously said that he was
able to tackle controversial subjects in The Twilight Zone that would
otherwise not be accepted on television by dressing them up as horror
and science fiction allegories.

And personally I’ve always believed
that horror films offer one of the clearest insights into our society
and lives, as they exploit and play off what we are afraid of at any
given points in time. That window into what scared people in the
past—whether brutal crime, religious fanaticism, nuclear war,
evolution, breakdown of civility, racial/social tensions—tells us a
lot about what we were like even if the films themselves no longer
scare us in the same way.

Toronto is a big centre for horror,
from filmmaking to film exhibition, to magazines. In your opinion, is
there a distinction between someone who is a fan of horror and
someone who is horror literate?

At the risk of having to choose sides
here, I do think there is a slight difference between fans and those
you call “horror-literate,” but anybody who is a horror fan and
has some curiousity about the genre can easily make the leap. I
overhear conversations at film screenings and talk with some of the
readers of Rue Morgue, and I know that a lot of people like horror
primarily because of the special effects, the breaking of taboos, the
jump scares, grotesque imagery, and that’s as far as their interest
goes. Some can’t articulate why they like horror, they just know
that they do. And that’s fine—we all started there, really. Other
horror fans have a desire to get deeper into the genre but don’t
know where to start—they’ve never taken a film class but maybe
they start to blog about films they’ve seen or buy a couple of
books on horror; they’re trying to engage with the genre. And
though we certainly welcome fans at every level of appreciation,
Andrea and I hope to help those that want to make the leap by
providing smart discussions about horror films and putting a
spotlight on additional resources that take people beyond just the
films.

We all have our own stories as to
how we became involved in horror. What's yours? How did you become
interested in horror, as a fan and an academic?

I actually consider myself more of a
cult and exploitation film fan than strictly horror, but obviously
horror films make up a big chunk of that nebulous area. When I was
probably around 10 or 11, I found a beat-up copy of a book called The
Golden Turkey Awards at a library discard sale and I used to pore
over the descriptions of weird genre films in there like Attack of
the Giant Leeches and Rat Pfink a Boo Boo. And, like many
kids, I also spent a lot of time in the horror aisles of video stores
staring at VHS box art—the cover of Chopping Mall in
particular. Within a few years I was renting as many ‘80s slashers
as I could get my hands on, as well as pretty much anything my local
Jumbo Video filed under “cult,” like Eating Raoul, Plan 9 From
Outer Space, Dolemite, The Corpse Grinders.

When I started buying VHS tapes in the
early 1990s (including most of the previously viewed cult films I use
to rent), one of the areas I concentrated on was 1950s science
fiction, mostly because I loved how terrible Plan 9 was, and
it was difficult to find much in this area to rent beyond the
certified classics. I surely read somewhere that these films were
really all about suppressed fears of atomic warfare, and I was soon
looking beyond the bug-eyed monsters and square-jawed military
scientists for those subtextual meanings. Along with other important
books like Re/Search’s Incredibly Strange Films and the
first Psychotronic movie guide, I started to read more
academic works on these films—one of the first I remember was
Patrick Lucanio’s Them or Us: Archetypal Interpretations of
Fifties Alien Invasion Films. I studied English rather than film
in university, but when I did start writing about film, first on my
website Canuxploitation.com and later for Rue Morgue magazine,
I tried to blend a well-thought out approach with an accessible,
inclusive style. But my overall approach to horror films is probably
more literary than a film student’s might be.

You're coming up to the third
lecture in the series. Can you talk about how the lectures are being
attended and received by the community?

We’re pleased with the turnouts so
far, especially since we had no idea how people would respond to The
Black Museum. To get as many people out as we do is heartening—though
we are fairly unique in what we do, we know that there are many other
film events in Toronto that appeal to the same basic audience. And
the feedback has been great so far, everybody seems to really enjoy
the presentations and come out of the theatre with something to think
about. And really, that’s entirely why we’re doing this—because
we knew this was the kind of event that needed to happen in Toronto.

Can you explain a bit about the work
that goes into creating something like The Black Museum, from initial
concept to introducing the speaker on lecture night? How do you,
Andrea, and Feedback work together to make it happen?

Without going into too many boring
details, we’ve been meeting as far back as March or so preparing
for the series. Once we kind of decided on the tone and approach, we
managed to secure the Projection Booth as a venue, which was a huge
step for us in moving forward with the series. Once we called in a
dozen favours, we had a logo and website up to announce our presence,
at which point we began contacting potential lecturers and taking
care of the smaller details—our banner, pinback buttons and our on
stage desk and props. Now that the events are running, most of our
activities revolve around promoting each event via social media and
making sure that the needed tech equipment is available and
compatible with everyone’s computers. Feedback is no longer on the
organizing committee due to other commitments, but even though Andrea
and I had not met prior to starting this project we have entirely the
same vision for the series and the same reasons for doing it. So it’s
been extremely easy to work with her to keep the Black Museum
chugging along.

This first series covers a lot of
ground: architecture, sociology, zombies, Canadian film, animation.
Was there a particular mandate you had in mind when you created this
series, certain topics you wanted speakers to address?

Not really, beyond a general need for
variety and a desire to present topics that were personal to the
presenters. In the case of both Feedback and I, we wanted to bring
what we’d done at Miskatonic to a new audience, and Andrea already
had planned to do something based on her thesis—so that was set
even before we had a name or venue. When we contacted Vincenzo Natali
and Steve Kostanski we actually had suggested a topic they might
want to do so they could see our planned approach. Vincenzo picked
his own topic, but it was still very much related to his interest and
work, and Steve agreed to do a lecture on stop motion animation, but is
taking it in a direction that I didn’t really anticipate, which is
fantastic.

Can you give us a taste of what or
who you hope to program for the next series?

Not really, unfortunately! We
originally planned this as a standalone series of five lectures and
want to see it through before we start talking about a second series.
But if it does happen, I will say that we will again be looking at a
mix of critics, local directors and other personalities that make
Toronto such a great place to be for horror fans.